Angel
by Phthia
Summary: While caged, Erik is visited (and saved) by a violinist's daughter. But to him, she is an angel.


The only time stillness settled over the camp was during winter. When dark came, the fires were lit and folk retreated into their tents. Everything they typically did beneath the moon they now d beneath canvas instead; eat, sleep, fornicate. Music played from somewhere at the other side of the compound, jubilant, meant for dancing and singing and fucking.

Not the lament or requiem he might compose, himself. His own landscape was duller, with all colour vanished from the world. Despair was an emotion he'd thought he'd reconciled himself with during the many years locked up alone in his little attic room in Boscherville. Somehow it was worse to be surrounded by the world and still be alone than to be segregated from it.

The moon was bright tonight, illuminating fat flakes of snow falling from the cold, unfeeling onyx of the sky above to litter the ground below in an even more unfeeling blanket of fairy dust. In his cage, he wrapped his arms around himself and trembled. Javert hadn't replaced his blanket. As he'd begged, and been beaten for earlier. The welts still stung sharply, crusted with blood and dirty through the tatters of his shirt.

Snow. It looked so lifeless, so alien. His fingers twitched against his thin chest, his golden eyes wincing to feel the sharp protrusion of his ribs. Would it be soft, or hard? Cold? Would it pass like sand through his fingers? The mason he wished to become had so many silent questions about its texture. Its consistency.

The little boy he still was deep inside instead wondered at how similar it appeared to his mother. Beautiful, but distant. Mercurial. Not something he might ever hold in his two hands and be able to call his own. Nothing in this life was meant for him. _She_ had told him that on more than one occasion.

He couldn't be sure of the date. Never could. One year had blurred into the next until they'd appeared like a smudge of ink in his mind, marring any record of time. Why? If nothing was meant for him, why had the being many mindless sheep called _God_ allow him to live? There would never be an answer, though nightly he railed against it.

Life itself felt as though it had never been _meant_ for him.

"Hey! I said – do you want to play?"

What? When, where, how – _ahhhh_. While he'd been thinking and shivering by himself at the far end of his cage where the straw still had a clean, earthy scent, someone had snuck up to its door. Golden eyes fixated upon the image on the other side, blinking rapidly against the blurring edges. The cold had seeped clean down into his bones, and he could hardly move. Hardly see.

But what he _could_ see was an angel. Radiant beneath the light of the moon, all chubby red cheeks and a riot of golden curls. Green eyes stared intently at him through the bars, and he noted how the warmth in them died the longer she looked up at him. Panic rose up, and one shaking hand slowly reached up and ensured that yes, the burlap sack was still there covering his face.

He didn't want her to know that monsters were real.

Those eyes, green as the young leaves on saplings in springtime welled with tears and she held out one of her gloved hands through the bars. "Oh. Oh no, look at me! Don't stop. Don't close your eyes. Stay with me." Strange. Why would she—but then she was reaching back, into that riot of curls to pull the pin that kept them in place.

It hadn't yet struck his benumbed mind that she'd recognized at once the signs that he was at Death's door. She knew from painful experience that to fall asleep outside in winter time was guaranteed to see one lowered into the hard ground the next day. Provided anyone was able to dig a hole through the frost-hardened earth, anyway. Her own mother had perished in such a way.

"Don't…" The only word he could muster. And it came out weak, warbled, thin.

The girl was already thrusting the sharp gleam of her hairpin into the lock that held his cage. The scraping it made, metal on metal almost made him scream. Certainly, he wanted to. Instead he looked at her, eyes glowing dimly through the holes in his makeshift mask. Why was she doing this? Did she not know that he'd never been able to sleep well, and that rest was a blessing?

"Just hold on!" Her voice gained a higher, if hushed pitch of alarm. She was whispering, he realized while he watched her tiny hands work at the lock. Rusted metal groaned and creaked until she found the spot inside that released its death grip upon the door of the cage. Then she exclaimed in triumph and relief and barged inside, bizarrely not at all afraid of the monster within.

_The monster_…

"No!" He exclaimed, eyes wide as he shrunk back to the back wall of the cage. If this were Javert, he'd have killed him. Moreover, he'd have bolted for his freedom without a second glance. But it was not, and he was weak and the innocent concern in her child's eyes made him squint his own shut. Why? He didn't believe in God anymore. Why would an angel visit him _now_ when he'd forsaken all?

He couldn't even register the feeling of her arms pulling him up, and barely heard the hitch of her breath when she felt the slightness of his weight. There was no doubt in his mind that she'd be able to light him easily. Yet still… she shook him, and warmth started to flare, a tiny spark deep in his chest as he looked at her.

Tears streaked her cheeks.

"I'm Christine," she whispered. "Stay with me."

Somehow, she managed to drag him across the camp and away from it, taking off her coat and draping it around his shoulders. Her father, he learned later, was a violinist who trailed the travelling fair that had performed alongside the camp that day. She had noticed him alone there and wondered if he might want to play later.

"Because it's Christmas. Papa always said no one should be alone on Christmas."

They were huddled together by the fire blazing in her father's tent when the roar of Javert sounded from across the countryside. Riders were dispatched to look for him. Three days, they camped in the forest. In which he could remember nothing other than warm broth, the heartbreaking strum of a violin and an angel's eyes watching over him every moment.

On the fourth, he looked up at her and smiled, though she couldn't see it under the sack.

"I'm Erik. I'll stay with you."

And he did.


End file.
